Break and Control
by ncfan
Summary: -Ryuuken- Dig my heart out until I don't have to breathe anymore.


**Characters**: Ryuuken, Soken, Minoru (OC), Sayuri, Isshin, Uryuu  
**Summary**: Dig my heart out until I don't have to feel anymore.  
**Pairings**: Ryuuken x Sayuri  
**Warnings/Spoilers**: no spoilers  
**Timeline**: pre-manga to manga  
**Author's Note**: Okay, it's not entirely coherent, I know, but that's not what I was aiming for. Also, if it isn't obvious to you already, my take on human nature takes a darker turn on several occasions; you'll find plenty of that here.  
**Disclaimer**: I don't own Bleach.

* * *

_i._

When he is a child, Ryuuken learns how to hide the pinprick dots on his fingertips from the observant eyes of his father and the eagle eyes of his more watchful mother.

He's not entirely sure why he does it. A pair of sharp scissors (the only pair in the house) goes against his fingertips until they bleed. Only one at a time, in all fairness; Ryuuken knows that if he went around with ten scabbed-over, red fingertips someone would be bound to notice and uncomfortable questions would no doubt ensue.

It's likely for the adrenaline rush, the release he can't get for the resentment against his father who leaves them both alone at all hours of night and day, with no guarantee that he'll ever come back. Ryuuken can't shout at his father, can't openly hold him in contempt, can't even get out of training himself, so this is his alternative instead:

Make himself bleed, and have this much control over his life, at least.

_ii._

She's a pale, clear-eyed girl he meets in school. There one moment, gone the next, never walking; she runs instead.

For all that she's not exactly the picture of robust health, Sayuri sparks with the sort of vitality Ryuuken has never been able to find in his own diseased home. It might be something about her ever-ready wide smile or the way her dark blue eyes are constantly sparkling with the aftermath of some bizarre plot that only she understands.

It might be the way she has keen eagle eyes like his mother and callused hands like him and his father, and manages to keep smiling like that, despite everything.

Ryuuken thinks to himself (he's willing to admit foolishly) some time in the eighth grade that she has a nice smile.

_iii._

In his fourteenth year his mother dies and there's no one now to pay attention as Ryuuken withers and sours and grows thinner by each day.

His father is only there, emotionally, in the most direct, intense filtration of grief. It is the first time he ever lets his father put his arms around his shoulders and unless extraordinary circumstances come to pass in the future Ryuuken is sure, even then, that it will be the last.

Food holds no appeal. It's not like there's ever been a great deal of it in the house (there's even less now; Mother was the one who worked) but now, except for the occasional piece of toast wolfed down before school in the morning, Ryuuken barely eats at all. It just isn't appealing; going anywhere near the cafeteria at school is enough to make him feel nauseous, so he stays outside during lunch, sitting on a bench and trying not to let himself smell the odors wafting from the lunches the students have brought there.

After the first few minutes, his father has more or less checked out. Ishida Soken is on for his own most intense path of grief and he doesn't notice his son. Normally this is how Ryuuken likes it—at least he doesn't have to be subjected to training in the practice of a dying (_dead, moribund, on its way out_) religion—but now he resents it. Somehow, it's always been like this; nothing Soken's ever done has garnered anything but his son's disapproval, but it's worse now.

Soken doesn't notice. The teachers don't notice either—they're too busy dealing with the strains of an overcrowded high school to notice one boy in particular, who's growing thin; he's hardly the only one.

Eventually, though, someone else does.

Ryuuken's sitting on the bench outside, waiting for the bell to sound so he can go back to class, when twin shadows block out the sun in front of him.

Sayuri's holding a scratched Tupperware container of… _something_ in hands with chipped fingernails and Minoru's frowning at him as though he's never seen anything quite like him before. Ryuuken looks right back at them, displaying that unnerving calm that he's already notorious for, and asks with equal calm, "Can I help you?"

The two sit on either side of him and Sayuri gracelessly shoves the container into his hands, whipping the appropriate utensil out of her sweater pocket and placing it on top of the lid. "Yes. You can eat this."

Naturally, Ryuuken objects, but Sayuri and Minoru both work on him until he finally gives way.

"You want to join your mother?" Minoru asks, dark eyes aghast. "By starving yourself?"

Sayuri sets her jaw. "Well I for one won't let you. You'll be in a sad state when you meet her if you do that, and you're a bit young for dying. So _eat_."

It's all very annoying, but a little comforting to some childish part of him at the same time.

Reluctantly, Ryuuken slides his fingers beneath the lid and pries it open. He's not going to win this fight, and he knows when to roll over and when to play dead; there's a time for both.

It's rice. Ryuuken can't help but stare dubiously down at it; all of the grains have the glistening sheen of char on them, giving him the impression that they were burnt the first time they were cooked. Feeling Sayuri's eyes burning holes into the back of his head, Ryuuken sighs long-sufferingly (_a habit he won't be able to break until after graduating from medical school_) in the way only a teenager can and takes the first bite.

The rice is scorched at the edges of the container and stone cold at the center, and the experience is one Ryuuken can't help but liken to traveling into the bowels of Dante's Hell. "You can't cook to save your life!" he chokes out, much to the amusement of his two friends.

"Oh thanks awfully," Sayuri responds dryly. "Personally, I don't see you stopping."

That's the truth. _God_, it tastes absolutely awful, but to someone who hasn't eaten anything for lunch (or supper) in over a week and a half, it's filling, and Ryuuken doesn't stop until he's cleaned out the plastic container, wincing as the last hard kernel that had been sticking to the side goes down his dry throat.

"There." She's smiling now, kindly. "Doesn't that feel just a little better?"

_iv._

That's the night that, finally, Soken notices. As Ryuuken steps in through the door at sunset, the older man realizes for the first time that he can smell the residue of some eaten food on his son's clothes, and that it's there for the first time in several days.

Though he's only in his middle forties, as Soken steps forward and puts a hand to his son's shoulder Ryuuken can't see anything but the shadow of age in his face. He looks ancient: face wan and deeply scored by lines around the eyes and mouth (_smile lines that his son shall never have_), hands scarred and callused, brown hair latticed with ugly cast-iron gray and eyes beginning to grow dull.

"Ryuuken, I—"

In Soken's slightly cracked voice there is a note of the apologetic, beneath which sorrow and the emotion that which in his father has recently (just this moment, in fact) become Ryuuken's bane (love) lies, just waiting for the slightest impetus to break the seal and rush forward like water from a broken dam.

It's all too much for words.

Ryuuken knows of only one thing to do with caught in this sort of situation. He shrugs him off abruptly, and retreats the fifteen steps needed to barricade himself in his room. For the rest of the night Ryuuken does not emerge, and he leaves early in the morning.

The unspoken words that chase his father as Ryuuken leaves are clear as day and stark as blood against flesh. _You have no right. You weren't even there. You didn't spend the long nights in the hospital; you didn't smell antiseptic fluid until it was _all_ you could smell. She asked for you when she was dying and you weren't there so how could you possibly understand what it's like, to still dream and remember and wake up thinking she's still alive until you know otherwise?_

Each syllable is as a knife—Ryuuken has, even at the painfully young age he inhabits now mastered the art of cultivating words into sharp edges and blades. Others might profess ignorance as to how much their words, the ones that go spoken and the ones that don't, hurt the one they're directed towards. Not Ryuuken.

He knows, exactly, the full measure of the pain he inflicts on his father with those words.

Measure out the sharpness, cast straight at the target, determine how much you want it to bleed and how much you want to just be bruises that will heal more quickly.

He wouldn't have it any other way.

_v._

While his relationship with his father is poisoned beyond recall and dying the same way the old lifestyle of their race is (despite Soken's fruitless but never-ending attempts to salvage both; it would be admirable if it wasn't so _annoying_), Ryuuken can't say the same of every relationship he finds himself adhered to.

"I'm a _pity_ date. A bloody, honest-to-God _pity date_! This is the worst; am I really that unattractive to women?"

If this is a reach for more sympathy (Minoru's already gotten enough from the aforementioned "pity date"), then that will be one line and reel Ryuuken will not be biting. "Kobayashi-san didn't say that," he asserts firmly, voice barely audible but more than loud enough for Minoru to hear, staring out at the river. It's a quiet, windless night and the surface of the water is as smooth and unmarked as polished black glass except for the shimmering orb of the streetlight and the ghoul of his reflection. Ever so reluctantly, he turns his attention from the river to Minoru, elbows still propped on the rails of the dock.

Minoru shrugs uncomfortably, a grimace appearing across his thin face, not meeting Ryuuken's level stare (There are few willing to do that; even some of the teachers have difficulty making eye contact with him). "Well, no… You know Kobayashi's too polite for that." He regains steam. "But the sentiment was there and you know it."

Ryuuken nods in commiseration; yes, he knows it. What he also knows (though Minoru won't admit it), was that Masaki was as much a pity date as Minoru. Masaki, for all of her sweet, gentle personality and her popularity with the class, wasn't asked to senior prom by anyone but Minoru. Something about exceptional good looks being intimidating, apparently.

"So how was _your_ date?"

"It wasn't a date, Minoru," Ryuuken explains for what feels like the hundredth time. In fact, that's more Sayuri's terminology than his own. She made it very clear that she didn't consider this a date and that neither should he; Ryuuken wouldn't really have minded it _was_ considered a date, but he's not sure how he would have explained that to her. The conversation to follow no doubt would have gotten more than a little awkward.

"Oh, so _that's_ your story." Minoru tries to engage in a conspiratorial smile, but again, Ryuuken does not bite.

"Yes, it is."

Sayuri and Masaki have already gone on home, the latter's yellow dress providing stark contrast against the former's worn jeans in the lamplight. Masaki smiled, Sayuri raised an arm above her head and waved, and the two boys did the same with varying (that is to say, in Ryuuken's case huge and in Minoru's only slightly less so) degrees of embarrassment and awkwardness.

Somehow, the conversation stays on the topic of girls and dates vs. not-dates vs. pity dates despite the fact that this isn't a topic either of them are at all comfortable with. "So…" Ryuuken works hard to make his tone somewhat pleasant; he really does try but it's hard to do on a dime "…aside from being a "pity date"—" Minoru snort and mutters something inaudible "—how was it at prom?"

Again, Minoru shrugs—a twitch for him like drumming fingers on flat surfaces is for Ryuuken. "It was alright, I guess. Overcrowded as usual; we didn't stick around all that long. Where were the two of you, anyway?"

Ryuuken doesn't make eye contact. "Out here," he answers shortly. When Minoru waves his hand in the air in such a way to request more information, he sighs and elaborates. "We got something to eat and basically just stayed out here."

"And did what?"

"_Nothing, Minoru_."

As the street lamp flickers, Minoru sighs. "God, you are hopeless."

"Oh, thanks."

A few more moments are spent in silence, and then Minoru laughs slightly. "Just think, Ryuuken. If guys like us can get dates—"

"It was not a date."

"—then I think the bar for women's standards has just gone down immensely."

"Again, thank you _so much_."

For tonight, things are the same as they ever are and have ever been—camaraderie, sarcasm and commiseration.

"Do you think Kouta's going to be angry when he finds out?" Minoru asks, now staring out at the river himself.

The thought—Kouta asked around desperately, asked virtually every girl at school to prom whether he knew them or not, including Sayuri and Masaki, and he was turned down every time—brings the hint of a smile to Ryuuken's face. "Yes, and I will greatly enjoy his face when he finds out."

"Delightful."

They never see each other again after high school graduation. Ryuuken has no news of Minoru for three years, until the news comes down to him that he's dead (_Rain, walking home, lightning_).

_vi._

Kurosaki Isshin blazes into Ryuuken's life like a loud and particularly unwelcome hailstorm. No, scratch that. After some deliberation, Ryuuken decides to revise his opinion, and changes Isshin's designation to a cross between a hurricane and Armageddon.

"_I don't know what you think is so awful about him," Sayuri laughs, tugging on Ryuuken's sleeve in the fruitless—though she does manage it eventually—attempt to pull him back into his apartment where the Shinigami is in the process of emptying his fridge. "I'll admit, Kurosaki-san's a bit… eccentric—"_

"_Insane would be a better word, Sayuri," Ryuuken interjects stiffly, face flushing red as she transfers her efforts from his sleeve to his hand. "Look, I'm not going back in until _he_ is out, so just—"_

"—_but he's not as bad as you make him out to be."_

"_You don't have to live with him."_

And Ryuuken doesn't understand why he has to either.

Eventually—after several years—though Ryuuken still despises that booming, irreverently loud voice of his, he comes to tolerate Isshin's presence in his apartment, and maybe, just maybe he respects him a little bit. The respect comes only because all of his jagged words just bounce off of Isshin like rain off of duck feathers.

_vii._

_FLASH!_

Ryuuken winces as a bright light is brought to bear before his eyes and gone within a second. He's seeing stars for a moment before he blinks and when he's blinked, there stands Isshin, holding a camera and wearing a grin.

"What was that for?" he asks indignantly, wincing as he reaches up to rub one eye.

Isshin's grin widens. "Because one of these days you're gonna be a grouchy old man. And there needs to be some proof for your future grandkids that even grouchy old men were lovesick teenagers once. Really, that face was priceless."

Ryuuken promptly confiscates the camera, much to Isshin's ire. Just as promptly comes the destruction of the film negatives.

There must be no evidence.

_viii._

A proposal of marriage comes with a rainy June in 1985. It is followed with reactions: the supportive, (_"Oh, good for you!"_), the impertinent (_"Well I was beginning to wonder."_) and the downright unwelcome (_"Damn it Ryuuken, couldn't you have waited just six more months? Now I've gotta wait before I can ask Masaki!" "Why?"_).

But the only reaction Ryuuken really cares about is Sayuri's.

He catches her off-guard in the apartment complex hallway (hardly a "romantic" spot to pick, but Ryuuken's about as romantic as dry rot so it's not like this was unexpected)—away from Isshin so he can't listen in—and for a few moments Sayuri just stares at him like he's suddenly started speaking Greek, fine black hair falling against her face.

Then, the sweetest smile spreads across her pale face, and she nods. "Yes."

Never before has a simple "Yes" been so sweet to the ears.

_ix._

Ryuuken isn't sure—will never be sure—what prompts him to name his son for his grandfather.

After demonstrating to him just what was wrong with his technique for holding a newborn (really, he doesn't think he has ever heard someone liken a child to a sack of flour before) and handing Uryuu back to him, Soken gapes at him, eyes dull with shock when, quietly, Ryuuken tells him what he's decided to name his child.

No one, not even Ryuuken is quite sure what it is that induces him to war against the past, to do battle with those who inhabit it. He's never even _met_ his grandfather; he died before he was born. And the need to cut off ties from the past, from the Quincy race as a whole is at times an overwhelming urge in him. Truces have never been met, no armistices will be signed on his behalf or by him—the war of attrition will rage on until everyone who could possibly remember is dead.

Soken rests a hand on his arm. The only reason Ryuuken doesn't pull away is because that's a difficult sort of maneuver to accomplish while holding a baby, but for once it's merely force of habit.

"Thank you, son," he says very quietly, and for the first time in a long time, when Soken smiles at him Ryuuken is capable of smiling back.

_x._

After a few moments alone have passed in the hallway, Ryuuken pays attention to the contours of his son's (_what an odd designation; "father" is an even stranger one, and yet it's one that will be attached to him to the rest of his life_) small face.

Uryuu's asleep. If anything, he's been asleep almost the whole time, only waking up to be passed from one pair of arms to another. He's got one tiny hand curled firmly around his father's forefinger and is showing no sign of letting go.

This is… quite odd.

Odd, but not unpleasant.

_xi._

A year and a little over pass, and things change.

Ryuuken wonders now, shivering in the snow and feeling a far more permanent cold seep into his bones to chill the marrow, if he'll always remember her with blood. Sayuri's painted herself and the snow scarlet with it, the only sign of color at all in the gray twilight.

_So much blood._ He closes his eyes and he can still see her, burned beneath his eyelids. _So much blood. _It's her voice Ryuuken hears in his head now, instead of his own. _So much blood_. His breath gives way. _So much blood._ The beginnings of water at his eyes, saline and burning, threatens to prick and score away at the skin.

Life is supposed to be a ladder of control and competence. Life is not supposed to have blood on its ladder. Life is not supposed to be a ladder of broken steps.

His lovely girl's not lovely anymore, not webbed down with glittering scarlet blood like she is, crumpled in the snow with her dark coat ripped and her white clothes stained red beneath.

—_Just as reckless as the rest, grounded not in this world but the next. A girl who didn't show age but still met Death, with her dark eyes open. Don't you wish you could have been there, so you could see It too?—_

When the police aren't looking, Ryuuken leans down with a hand stretched out like a child inspecting some bizarre mushroom or plant.

There's snow dusted over her eyelashes—it looks a bit like confectioner's sugar if he tilts his head and squints. Beneath the garish spread of blood her skin is mottled with blue spots, the outlines of veins painting powder blue zebra patterns all over her. Sayuri's red mouth is nearly purple now, the pale fingernails the same.

Her hair is stiff with drying blood instead of fine and soft, and when Ryuuken pulls his hand away it's painted with blood now too.

He'll always remember her with blood.

He'll never remember her without it.

_xii._

Now is the time that starts when Ryuuken throws himself grimly into his work, and never throws himself out of it.

He sees no reason why he should not.

The world of the dead is a world of questions that will never be unraveled; it's no place for a man who doesn't like questions he can't find answers to, and as such it is without a doubt not a place for Ishida Ryuuken, who doesn't like questions without answers. All things have their patterns, all things have their place, all things have their niches they fall into neatly, at least they should, and if they don't then he has no time for them.

_No aberrations here._

It's an odd method, to try to forget blood by wading in it, but forget it Ryuuken does.

He can't do anything for the dead. The dead are dead, and they should attend to themselves; that's what the Shinigami are for, aren't they? They got their act together a long time ago; there hasn't been any real need for his people, as far as Ryuuken cares to see, in centuries.

Ryuuken can't do anything for the dead. He doesn't _want_ to do anything for the dead.

Better to reserve his efforts for the living.

Ryuuken isn't much for multi-tasking. He can only live in one world at a time and he has no desire, nor has he ever, for walking in both at one time. Why would _anyone_ want to subject themselves to that?

The living have real blood, real pain, real grievances and real pulses. He hears their voices more clearly than he has ever the spirits of those who have passed into death. Someone should be able to take care of them.

Here, treating the wounds of the living, there is some degree of order. Everything neat, orderly and predictable (_even when it's not_), which is how Ryuuken likes it. Ryuuken doesn't like surprises.

What he wants to do is not preserve the souls of the dead, but rather preserve the _lives_ of the living. Ryuuken has no desire to see any fourteen-year-old boy staring, lost and shell-shocked and pinched face all down in tears, nor anything quite like that.

Ryuuken doesn't like mirrors either. Or anything that can reflect, for that matter.

_xiii._

Son? What son?

_xiv._

"You're _not_ fine." Worry is an exceedingly rare emotion to ever hear in Kurosaki Isshin's voice. He's looking at him with an expression that he has no right to feel. "You're _not_. You barely eat; you sleep even less." A rough, heavy hand descends on Ryuuken's shoulder and feels like the hand of Death; ironic, that, and fitting too.

"This isn't healthy," and Isshin goes on to babble on and on, with words that Ryuuken occasionally recognizes in the floor. Things like _manic-depressive_ and _depression_ and _grief overwhelming_ until Ryuuken can't listen anymore.

"Isshin," he says calmly, "shut up."

For once in his life, when Ishida Ryuuken tells Kurosaki Isshin to shut up, he does, and Ryuuken only wishes he could enjoy it.

_xv._

In the middle of the night during the summer when even the air conditioning Ryuuken keeps at a constant, chilly sixty-nine degrees can't deny entirely the heat and the humidity that seeps in through windowsills and underneath doors, he comes to a conclusion.

He doesn't like the sound his heart makes when it beats.

Ryuuken can hear it now: _thump-thump-thump_, the pulse that tells him he's still alive even when everything else within him tells him that he's dead (_There are deaths far more profound than the death of the flesh_).

The heartbeat rises and falls in his ears like the passage of the ocean tide panting against the rocks. _It's all in the memory_, his heartbeat tells him, _it's all in the memory. You can't forget what you've lost and now nothing seems like anything worth doing. It doesn't even seem to be worth it to breathe, does it?_

Ryuuken wishes, in moments of madness that only come to him at night when darkness cloaks his madness, that he could dig his heart out of his chest and hold the quivering, gently pulsating organ in his hands.

But he knows he can't.

The Devil's in the details, and Ryuuken would stop breathing long before he ever dug deep enough to reach his heart.

_xvi._

Ryuuken's physical awareness of his son far outstrips his emotional awareness of him; if anything, the latter is non-existent in entirety.

He's aware that there's a small child sharing the house with him that needs to be fed and clothed and taken care of. He is aware, all too aware, of Uryuu's presence in the house.

It's impossible to be consciously emotionally aware of him, because Uryuu is like his mother to the extent that anyone would swear, but for gender and glasses over his eyes that he looked the shadow of her, and Ryuuken has to agree, looking at pale skin and fine inky black hair and wide, curious blue eyes. _Just like her. Just like her._ Too much like her for anyone's good, let alone either Ryuuken's or his son's.

Mostly, Uryuu ends up in the care of his grandfather, who is _more_ than happy to keep him during the day while his father is at work—_and sometimes at night too, on those nights when Ryuuken forgets or is simply unwilling to come home_. Ryuuken's learning to resent this too even though he's the one who hands Uryuu over to Soken in the early morning and comes to take him back in the evening. He's not sure why, but even though he disconnects himself from his son emotionally he still feels keenly the knowledge that Uryuu's far happier in his grandfather's company than he is in his.

It is another dark, quiet night when madness threatens to take him over when Ryuuken suddenly realizes that he isn't alone in his bed.

There's a horrific amount of effort needed not to say Sayuri's name, and it's a while, even after that, for Ryuuken to shake off enough sleep to remember that she's dead, her soul locked in some Hollow's belly, and that she won't be answering him. The fact that his eyes discern in the deep gloom a head of shiny black hair doesn't help.

Uryuu has nightmares—Ryuuken has woken up to find his son curled up next to him once before—and the three-year-old child's blue eyes meet his now in a state of… of… abject terror, honestly.

What might be the echo of a surprised squeak hits the air as Ryuuken doesn't send him away but just pulls him closer, a hand against his hair.

He can feel a small hand curling over his shirt and the weight of Uryuu's head on his chest—Ryuuken may hate the sound of his own heartbeat, but Uryuu doesn't seem to have that issue. If anything, he almost seems to find it comforting.

Ryuuken is aware, emotionally, of his son, for the first time since seeing a woman lying in the snow, china-doll face painted with blood. It's hard to let him go when the morning comes.

_xvii._

That newfound flush of… whatever it was Ryuuken found trying to soothe a child's fears without words is lost before another year is gone. What might have been the final normal growth of what it is a father is supposed to feel for his child is stagnated, put on ice, by the sight of raw patches of tattered skin on his four-year-old son's hands.

Uryuu, it appears, has made his choice, and if he will not live in the land of the living, Ryuuken doesn't know how to deal with him.

_Another aberration. How am I to handle this?_

He does not know how, so he simply does not.

_xviii._

Ryuuken can only clearly recall one incident in which he has ever physically laid hands on his son with the intent to harm him. Uryuu remembers it all too well himself, but denies its very existence even to himself, because the whole thing still confuses him so badly and gives rise to the life of ugly, powerful emotions within him.

It all happens so fast: a boy of seven stands at his shoulder in the kitchen. He is asking questions, the provocation brought to him until, out of pain and an inability to understand why he finally asks the question too impertinent and too piercing for his father not to feel the blade against his skin.

"_Is it because I look like Mother?"_

What follows directly is a sharp crack splitting the air and Uryuu stumbling back until he staggers into the kitchen table as Ryuuken draws his open hand back to him, marveling that he hasn't felt this much emotion in him in _years_.

There's a look of betrayed shock dawning over Uryuu's face as he stares up at him, fingering his already reddening cheek with the tips of his fingers, and feeling just as keenly the weird sensation of violence erupting over his pale, smooth skin like a hungry fire for the first time in his life. He doesn't cry (_too shocked for tears_) but only stays silent, mouth slightly ajar.

Then, he turns on his heel and walks away, back towards his room as quickly as he can without running.

The next morning, a dark purple bruise has bloomed across his cheek like some grotesque flower and Uryuu won't meet his father's gaze, or even say anything to him; he nods "yes" or "no" in response to questions and nothing more than that. When Ryuuken reaches out to try to touch his shoulder Uryuu flinches away and steps out the front door to go to school.

Despite his father's consistent injunctions to the otherwise, Uryuu still goes to see his grandfather after school (and looking back, Ryuuken can't help but think that whatever Uryuu told his teachers in way of explanation—if one was required at all—it must have been convincing) for training and often just for his company. The teachers at the school might not have noticed, but Soken certainly does, and it shows when, for the first and last time he walks Uryuu home and takes the opportunity to subject Ryuuken to the worst dressing down he will ever receive.

It is short, to the point, and quiet; Uryuu is, after all in the next room, the walls are thin, and Soken's never been much of one for shouting to start with. In fact, it consists of less the number of sentences that would constitute a paragraph.

"_I did not raise you to use your greater strength against those who are smaller and weaker than you. What on earth do you think gives you the right, just because your son asks you a question you do not want to hear, to strike him so hard that it leaves a mark the next day?"_

Food for thought, and after that Soken is gone.

Ryuuken was already thinking to start with.

The consequences of physical force are too unpredictable; far too many variables in the equation for all of them to be foreseen. And Ryuuken hates to admit it, but he just doesn't like the way Uryuu looked at him after he slapped him; the feelings the memory of that expression evokes in him is something far too akin to guilt for his liking.

(There's another thing that bothers him. Uryuu's always been quiet and a bit jumpy at the best of times. Now, he winces every time his father moves, clamping his mouth firmly shut.)

There are those who simply have an innate knowledge of pain and the infliction of it, regardless of their upbringing. Break and control, that's how it's always been; clean fractures done so they can be easily tracked. In future, sticking to words with sharp edges will likely be best.

They're easier to control.

_xix._

Looking at him lying mangled in the grass, Ryuuken wonders now if he'll always remember his father with blood too, and he finds that the thought doesn't bother him nearly as much as the _other_ he will always remember with blood.

It doesn't bother Ryuuken, but it nearly kills Uryuu, in more ways than one.

Perhaps it does kill him, in certain ways.

_Words clutch in his throat so hard that Ryuuken feels as though he'll start to bleed from his throat before long when he sees Uryuu, pale, trembling, covered in blood and face reddened with tears. He can't think of anything to say but "Are you alright?" in a voice far too shaky for his own liking.  
_

_xx._

Ryuuken sees Uryuu pricking his fingertips with a needle on accident as he puts it through cloth and wonders if Uryuu's picked up the art of controlling pain to give him some semblance of control over his life.

_xxi._

What Ryuuken doesn't expect after Soken's death is for his relationship with his son—_what's left of it_—to start to deconstruct in earnest, so quickly. He had hoped (_he knows he's mistaken now, and wonders what ever made him think that he could trust to hope_) that as time went on, Uryuu would grow away from his grandfather's teachings, that he would just forget and move on.

The greatest flaw in his predictions, Ryuuken can see in retrospect, was underestimating the hold the dead can have over the living. From personal experience, he ought to have known better.

Things are so out of control by the time four years have passed from Soken's death that Uryuu has, in full, taken up his grandfather's mantle and taken to killing whatever Hollow he comes upon. An adult's job, not a child's.

Well fine. If Uryuu wants to act as an adult in this fashion, Ryuuken fails to see why he should temper his words on account of Uryuu's age. And he doesn't understand why, if Uryuu wants to take his life into his own hands in the worst possible way, he shouldn't try to distance himself so when the inevitable day comes and the boy dies young, he won't have to feel as though he should have done something.

Ryuuken comes face to face again with the fine art of miscalculation when Uryuu is thirteen.

"Who do you think will care if you never come home, if you…" Ryuuken barely restrains himself from saying _'if you end up like your mother and your grandfather'_; he's already used that once before, and he didn't like the result "…if you end up dead on the ground, if a Hollow kills you and doesn't leave enough of you behind to be identified by the police or anyone else?"

"I should think you do," the young boy retorts, not looking at him.

Ryuuken grits his teeth. "I've told you time and again, Uryuu. Look at me when you're talking to me."

So reluctantly, Uryuu does. His dark eyes are hot with anger and shadowed with apprehension at the same time. "I should think you do," he repeats stubbornly, a look of triumph on his face at having caught him—or so Uryuu thinks.

Triumph? There's a feeling Ryuuken wants nothing more than wipe off of Uryuu's face. "What makes you think that?" he asks coldly.

Uryuu stiffens.

"What makes you think that I should care at all, considering how insistent you are on taking your life into your own hands? I have no time to waste on suicidal fools, after all."

For maybe a minute and a half, Uryuu is silenced, his jaw working and his mouth moving but no words coming. As he stares at him, an emotion that Ryuuken has forgotten how to identify starts to bloom over Uryuu's face.

"Fine," he mutters, voice barely audible, "Fine. That's… that's just _perfect_. Why do I even bother… I'm leaving," Uryuu announces in that slightly defensive and highly accusatory way he has about him. He's out of the kitchen, gone.

_xxii._

It sounds so much like a childish threat—and Uryuu _is_ a child, no matter what he thinks and what Ryuuken sometimes believes—that Ryuuken honestly doesn't take it seriously.

But when he comes back, Uryuu isn't there. And he's not there in the morning either.

Ryuuken finds himself venturing into his son's room for the first time in years. There's a bit of cross-stitching left behind on the bed, an earlier work to judge by the shaky lines. The cloth is rough in his hands.

He'll be back, he's so sure. But he's not.

_xxiii._

Once Uryuu is gone, the house is much quieter. It seems so much bigger, really, with only one person living there, whereas before when things were at their worst between father and son, the house seemed unbearably small.

With no child waiting for him at the house—_it's ceased to be home; Ryuuken doesn't know when, but at some juncture he's stopped thinking of it as home_—Ryuuken ends up staying at work until all hours of the night. Not that he didn't do that before, but now he might find himself at the hospital until midnight or later. There's nothing stopping him, absolutely nothing.

It's just a way to try to fill up the empty hours, to not hear his heart beating or blood dripping somewhere unseen.

_xxiv._

"—unsightly of you." As those words leave his lips, Ryuuken pauses for just a moment at the sight of Uryuu's face.

It's not the shock, the growing apprehension or even the offense overtaking his features that Ryuuken notices, but the boy's face itself.

Uryuu has, at sixteen managed to end up with facial features halfway between those of his parents, sharper in features than his mother's but still softer than Ryuuken's. It's slightly startling.

No less startling than the complete lack of reiatsu around him, even though Ryuuken had already braced himself for that.

_xxv._

On the ground, heavily battered and out like a light, Uryuu is inked with blood like his mother and his grandfather before him, the wound on his chest like a red tattoo, almost. Ryuuken wonders if, like those who are dead he'll always remember him with blood from here on out.

He knows better. He's already leaned down to take his pulse and the sharp groan jerking itself from Uryuu's mouth a moment after Ryuuken has this thought tells him that Uryuu is without a doubt still alive.

He'll remember him with blood anyway.

If he keeps up the behavior that has brought him to this point, Uryuu will be dead to fit the mould soon enough.

_xxvi._

With a bit of paper crumpled in his hand and Isshin gone, Ryuuken knows for the first time the bitter sensation of being forced to _eat his words_.

The thought that Uryuu's gone off and done something spectacularly idiotic once again is nothing to the cold reality that this time, he's even less likely to come back than he has been every other time he's left.

_xxvii._

What Ryuuken learns when he finds out Uryuu's back is something so akin to relief that it takes him a moment to remember that it's the idiots who have the best luck and that Uryuu is an _utter_ idiot.

He just barely manages to remind himself in time to keep his breath and words from choking in his throat.

_xxviii._

Things are back to normal soon enough.

"Plainly, I don't give a damn about our "deal"—those people are my friends; I can't just sit by and watch as they get into trouble or get hurt or…" Uryuu breaks off, and Ryuuken doesn't look at him.

Instead, he absently pulls a book down from the bookshelf and sighs in the sort of way that indicates that he's all too used to things like this. "Oh, _that's _charming. Am I to take it to mean that you value your "obligations"—" Ryuuken practically spits the word out "—to your friends above all else?" The implication there is obvious.

He's still looking through the book, thumbing through pages when Uryuu answers. "You've never given me much of a reason—_Look at me!_" The sudden shout reverberates through the empty spaces of the room and Ryuuken knows Uryuu's burning holes into the side of his head even if he's not looking at him. Uryuu's voice is thick as he says, "You always want me to look at you when I'm talking, but you're always looking over my head or _straight through me_. Look at me," he insists.

Ryuuken slams the book shut and he turns his eyes on his son. There are uneven patches of color at the top of Uryuu's cheeks; otherwise his face is as pale as snow. His eyes are open wide and just a touch wild. Ryuuken's eyes narrow. Having the full measure of his words before he speaks, he says, with deadly calm, "If you hate me, Uryuu, you should make a clean breast of it now and get it over with. Nothing is served by you making an even bigger fool of yourself than usual. If you hate me, just say so."

The effect this has on Uryuu is… interesting.

The patches of red in his cheeks grow darker, and he sets his jaw and leaves, footsteps echoing in Ryuuken's ears long after he leaves the house that hasn't been home to him in years.

Ryuuken draws in a deep breath as he replaces the book on the shelf. Words are the only weapons they possess that are capable of doing real harm; he would have thought Uryuu would know this by now.

But he doesn't. Uryuu is a fool when it comes to everything that matters.

He can make his words sharp, but he can't smooth out the edges. At his age, Ryuuken was able to do that and more.

The system of _break and control_ has no place for bleeding hearts, or for foolish children who still hold to their ideals and don't hate the sound of their own heart beating.


End file.
